Identity and Social Change in North-Western Europe (BCE 250/100 - 200 CE): new narratives through funerary evidence

Abstract

The thesis contends that local identities in North-Western Europe in the PRIA and early Roman period were more altered by the experience of empire than has previously been understood in archaeology. The work offers insights into local and regional attempts at organising coherent funerary traditions in the areas of south-eastern England and the southern Netherlands. Four chapters focus on the Pre-Roman Iron Age (PRIA) burial record, body articulation in the PRIA, group identities in the immediate post-conquest period, and urban-rural social differences, respectively. The PhD’s unique dataset of all known PRIA and Roman-period graves from the study area makes possible an at-once-systematic and comparative approach to changing sociocultural practices within regions often overlooked as being on the imperial fringe. Each chapter expands on earlier postcolonial analysis in archaeology and history to cast light on cultural amnesias and the fragmentation of identity in situations of growing material incursion and external imperial occupation and control. The thesis prepares the way for PRIA and Roman-period archaeology to take a better-informed role in debates on the complexity and repercussions of empire.